How to get Cisco VPN Client working on Mac OS X

Many organizations provide VPN access for the end user in their company with third party tool named as Cisco VPN client. This doesn’t work on any 64-bit Mac OS.

However, from Mac OS X 10.6, you can use in-built feature named as IPSec VPN ,so you don’t need to look around for any third party tool. In this case, you might have to decode your .pcf file which contains all the configuration of your VPN setting.

Here’s step by step guide for configuring it:

Open System Preferences -> Network

Click “+” to get more options where you have to select Interface “VPN” and VPN Type “Cisco IPSec“. Here by give your proper description in “Service Name” and click Create

Once you create this, the main work out is to decode the “enc_GroupPwd” which you can’t simply copy and paste.

Simply, open .pcf file that you got from your organization in any editor (e.g.: Notepad ++ ), and copy host name and put it in your server address.

Click Authentication Settings, and mention GroupName as per your pcf file. Now you will see enc_GroupPwd in your pcf file which you need to decode and put it in Shared Secret

There are many ways for getting the clear group password. However, I recommend to use the this link to decode it. Once you mange to setup all the required settings, you can simply press connect.